For Anna, an immemory, 2024
AI-generated photos with light projection; slideshow projection; and video projection (8mm film, VHS & AI-generated photos), 6’39”
Completed over the course of three years, my project “For Anna, an immemory” (2024) combines both field research in the form of interviews as well as innovative applications of the latest developments in artificial intelligence.
After collecting nearly nine hours of interview footage with family members about our family’s immigration story, and delving into the oral and visual histories already recorded on VHS and 8mm film, I began to search for new ways of paying homage to the past, while also questioning the ethics of retelling what cannot be entirely known.
Can a family album that was previously incomplete due to historical circumstances be recreated with data scraped from images of other homes, buildings and people? Can existing portraits of people and places be animated, without consent, for the sake of telling stories that should have been told? And can any of this be done in an ethically sound way?
In this three-part installation, a video combining interviews and real footage of my family (8mm film & VHS) is mixed and mirrored with AI-generated images of our lost ancestral community (DALL-E 2) in order to create a new narrative. The newly recounted story weaves together decontextualized interview clips with family members; fake images of landscapes, buildings and families; and the few real images that remain in our family archive.
The result is a version of events that is at once fictitious and real, and two layers of “reality” come into focus. The artificiality of my chosen media, which include text-to-image and facial-stitching technologies (DALL-E 2; MyHeritage Portrait animation), highlight the tensions between the personal and the artificial; the hallucinations of AI and the fallacies of human memory; and the questions of ownership that inevitably arise from the use of generative media. The work urges the viewer to question the reliability of memory and the stories they accept as “the truth.”